Monday, December 10, 2007

Pulse Plaxo - spams you from random people and offers opt-out (don't you expect something more from a "social networking site"?)

Alright, oh please not again one more social networking site?
Justonemoredamnsocialnetworkingweb2.0website.com?

Let's have a look.

From: pulse@mx.plaxo.com
Subject: Dipl. Detlef Käding added you as a connection on Pulse
Date: December 10, 2007 2:51:11 PM GMT+00:00
To: [my email]
Reply-To: pulse@plaxo.com

Dipl. Detlef Käding wants to add you as a connection on Plaxo Pulse.

To accept this connection request, go to:
http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/invite/?i=somerandomnumber

Thanks!
The Plaxo team

---
What's Pulse?

It's the first networking tool to span business and personal life.

Your family, friends, and business connections are using lots of different sites to find and share content. Some are writing blogs. Others write restaurant and product reviews. And many are uploading photos and videos. Until now, finding that stuff has been really hard - and staying on top of it, even harder. Let Pulse bring it to you - automatically - in your own personal stream of news.

Don't want to receive emails from Plaxo any more? Opt out:
http://www.plaxo.com/opt_out


1. I don't know anyone called Detlef Käding.

2. I have never subscribed or even been to pulse.com.

3. I absolutely don't want to join one damn more failure of social networking site that someone that I have never heard of in my life invites me to.

4. The biggest failure of them all: considering the above, you are offering me an opt-out for your spam site? I never opted in, so I should not have to opt out. Quit flooding my inbox.

Let's have a look.

Plaxo Pulse Random Connections - I'm not the only one ...
Does Plaxo flood your inbox with connection requests? - definitely not the only one... and there are a huge number of others out there. I think I'm happy enough to forward every single pulse or plaxo (by the way, does plaxo come from the word plague?) to my isp spamfilter. And possibly remove the people that I would know sending me that spam from my professional networks in the other services that I already use.

A comment from Tom's blog (above) probably sums it better than a good googling around:

In a previous iteration, Plaxo was notorious for spamming the contacts you had listed on it to get them to sign up for Plaxo service - after many complaints the publicly renounced this policy and promised to be on their best behaviour.


Dear Real Life friends and business contacts, in case you want to ever add me, let's make a deal? Keep it in linkedin. That said, if I don't know who you are and you make no effort in introducing yourself to me, I will click the "I have no clue who this person is" button.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks guys, I got on here to find out what this crap was, but no one really gave a good answer. I guess it will go to the spam folder.

Anonymous said...

If I'm not mistaken (but I usually am), Plaxo has some link to AOL. I seem to remember about 7 years ago signing on for AOL's instant messanger to keep up with some friends who wouldn't dump AOHell, and the emails involved in signup came from Plaxo.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for saving me the pain of finding out what this is myself. I've got plenty of ways to be reached already. Can't imagine why I would need another. email me if you want anything

Anonymous said...

I received one of these invitations from a family member - the concern is that my private details were already there. Like name and birthday!

Anonymous said...

my invites came from LinkedIn.com contacts...

Anonymous said...

i got a spammer on me at this moment ive been playing with, them. they call me constantly an send me emails everyday. they are only asking for 310 dollors strangly though. can some one contact me an offer advice, did anybody also recieve an email from the FBI seatle division saying the account there refering to is viable. my email is Seanadyson@yahoo.com

Anonymous said...

plaxo is email spammer they want to send thourgh them your outlook base and they have your addresses from your outlook for free to the next customers.
probably someone has your address and plaxo send to you immediately from their base they have from stupid people.
they have a service that you can send thourgh then your emaisl faster then from outlook.
i losted in that way 1500 email addresess.